


Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky

by under_the_perseids



Series: Before We Get Started, Does Anyone Want to Get Out? [6]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 15:07:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30141405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/under_the_perseids/pseuds/under_the_perseids
Summary: Steve deals poorly with losing Bucky, and he goes after Schmidt.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Before We Get Started, Does Anyone Want to Get Out? [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048645
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the tags! Steve is suicidal after losing Bucky. There is nothing nice or happy in the following words.
> 
> The scenes are taken straight from "Captain America: The First Avenger" right after Bucky falls from the train.

Steve reached out, but his arm wasn’t long enough. And Bucky fell.

* * *

Steve had no clear memory of how he got to the pub. After Bucky fell ( _ How could he be gone? They had just been joking with each other less than 20 minutes prior! _ ), time lost all meaning. It slowed down, sped up, turned upside-down and inside-out on him. Every other sense was so disjointed that Steve felt like he had before the serum: colors were muted, voices came at him underwater, his heartbeat was erratic, and an ever-present weight on his chest made it difficult to breathe. This was just some horrible nightmare that he’d wake up from. It had to be. 

But he found himself in the bombed-out pub where over a year prior Bucky had told him that he was going to follow that little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. And Bucky had followed him, followed him right to his gruesome death. What did it matter how many people they saved over their time together with the Howlies if Bucky weren’t there right by his side? There was no future without Bucky in it. No life. He wasn’t Steve Rogers without Bucky Barnes.

“God, Buck...why’d you have to go and leave me all alone? What am I going to do?” Steve whispered hoarsely into his whiskey glass.  _ Get off your ass and stop throwing yourself a pity party, punk _ Steve could feel Bucky say. He knew it was true, but...he just couldn’t do it. He just sat at the small table drinking whiskey that tasted of fire but could not make him drunk, no matter how much he imbibed. His world narrowed down to watching Bucky fall, over and over and over again. And how he failed at saving his husband, over and over and over again.  _ I could have tried to reach further. We could have fallen together. I could have _ ….But Steve didn’t really know what else he could have done. It all happened so fast. And then his world was gone.

And now he was here. Hours or weeks later, he wasn’t sure. He had vague recollections of the Howlies gently guiding him through the events after Bucky’s death. They all mourned their sergeant, but at least they were functional. They may have fought in the war longer with Bucky, but Bucky had had Steve’s six for more than 20 years. Always at his back, always willing to finish a fight that Steve had usually foolishly started, always there with his love safely cocooning Steve. Steve didn’t just feel untethered, he was completely adrift with no land in sight. 

He didn’t  _ feel _ much of anything, actually. Every emotion blurred and ground down to a dullish gray-brown, like the rubble currently surrounding him. Pieces of life destroyed and scattered by war. He had been in a mind-numbing stupor since the train, information took hours to penetrate the thick fog surrounding his brain, and his limbs were useless dead weight. Steve was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, but he was often awake at all hours of the day and night without any actual sleep happening. He didn’t even know the last time he got any real sleep. Which was why he tried to drink his way to a soporific state, but alas, that was not working either.

It was at this point that Agent Carter found Steve. He was so lost that he didn’t even notice her pick her way through to him until she was right behind him. He had enough brain power to repeat some hypothesis that Dr. Erskine had told him about his cells regenerating, that he couldn’t get drunk because of it. She replied that Dr. Erskine thought it could be a side effect. 

Carter took a seat next to Steve and tried to reassure him, “It wasn’t your fault.”

But it was Steve’s fault. He had selfishly asked Bucky to fight with him, had taken him on the train, and didn’t save him. He rolled his eyes. “Did you read the report?”

“Yes,” she responded sympathetically.

“Then you know that’s not true.” Steve couldn’t bring himself to even look at Agent Carter. 

“You did everything you could.” But had he? “Did you believe in your friend? Did you respect him?”  _ Of course I do...did _ he thought indignantly. He finally looked up, and Carter could see the answer in his eyes. “Then stop blaming yourself. Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He damn well must have thought you were worth it,” she finished vehemently. 

Steve found himself saying, “I’m going after Schmidt. I’m not gonna stop until all of Hydra is dead or captured.” A far cry from him telling Dr. Erskine that he didn’t want to kill anyone. The doc had told him he was a good man. But that was with Bucky at his side. Without Bucky? That was a different tale altogether. Steve didn’t want to just defeat Hydra. He wanted to annihilate them. He wanted to inflict on them the same pain he now felt. Hydra had captured and tortured Bucky, and they were the reason that he had needed Bucky on that damn train. It wasn’t the whiskey, but Steve finally felt some fire in his belly. Beautiful, dark, vengeful fire.

* * *

They were so close to finally getting the Red Skull. The Howlies were doing what they did best destroying the base around them, and Steve? Steve was running after a goddamn plane from the future. He was fast, but there was no way he was going to catch a plane. They,  _ he _ , couldn’t let Schmidt get away again. He heard a rumble coming from behind him and a sleek black car pulled up next to him with Colonel Phillips yelling at him to get in. He jumped in and they roared after Schmidt. As he was about to climb to the hood of the car, Agent Carter told him to wait, and then she kissed him. He stared stupidly at her for a beat while she told him to go get Schmidt.  _ Agent Carter kissed him. Why? _ In a daze, he turned to the Colonel, who said, “I’m not kissing you.” That shook Steve out of his reverie, and he climbed from the car into the landing gear of the Valkyrie. 

After a fight that took Steve out of the Valkyrie on the back of a bomb and back again into the plane, he watched as the Red Skull grabbed the Tesseract and... _ disappeared _ . The Red Skull was gone. He jumped into the pilot’s chair and looked at the controls. Many of them were inoperable and much of the plane was in irreparable shambles after his fight with the Hydra goons. There was no way for Steve to land safely.

He was going to fall (crash) to his death, mirroring Bucky, albeit encased in a plane with bombs of insurmountable power. Steve was going to see Bucky again. Some of the fog lifted from his being. The way out of the darkness was to embrace it. This, he could do. What a relief it would be to not have to fight anymore. To just be at peace. With Bucky, his love, his soulmate, for all eternity. 

Steve remembered that he had people needing to hear his status and that of the Red Skull. Thank god the radio still worked. He got through to Morita, but Agent Carter impatiently interrupted, “Steve, is that you? Are you all right?”

He replied that the Red Skull was dead, but then she asked about the plane. Steve paused a beat. “That’s a little bit tougher to explain,” he said as he tried to see what controls might still work. Carter asked for his coordinates to give him a safe landing site, but she didn’t understand. “There’s not gonna be a safe landing. But I can try and force it down.” Steve couldn’t save himself, but he could save New York and the Eastern Seaboard. When Agent Carter insisted, “I’ll get Howard on the line. He’ll know what to do,” he had to tell her that there wasn’t enough time, the Valkyrie was moving too fast. He looked out to the horizon, a contradictorily peaceful scene ahead of him. At least he could experience a beautiful sunrise one more time.

“I got to put her in the water.”

“Please, don’t do this. We have time. We can work it out,” Agent Carter’s voice wavered, so unlike her normal commanding tone.

But there was no time. “Right now I’m in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer, a lot of people are gonna die.” All Steve had ever wanted was a chance to help people who needed it and to stand up to bullies. He could do both with his final act. Recalling Agent Carter’s words to him about respecting Bucky’s choice, he said, “Peggy, this is my choice.”  _ My choice to be a hero. My choice to die. My choice to end the numbness. _ He took out his compass, which had a newspaper picture of Agent Carter, and placed it on the controls. Everyone thought the British agent was his wartime sweetheart, but what they didn’t know was that Bucky’s picture was underneath hers. He needed both of them with him, and he wanted to look at Peggy as he talked to her during his final minutes. He hated disappointing her, but one way or another, he was not coming out of this. At least this way, he could at least save his country. And be with Bucky again. 

For the umpteenth time in his life, Steve faced death. He had never feared it; with all of his illnesses over the years, death was inevitable, a constant companion waiting a few steps behind. But for the first time, he welcomed it, even though he knew it was going to hurt.

He pushed the controls forward to make the plane nosedive. He called out, “Peggy?”

Her quiet voice replied, “I’m here.”

“I’m going to need a rain check on that dance.” He was coming ever closer to the vast ice sheet.

“All right,” Peggy said with tears in her voice. “A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club.”

“You got it.” The clouds whipped past the plane.

“8:00 on the dot. Don’t you dare be late. Understood?”

“You know, I still don’t know how to dance.” The plane started to shake more intensely around him.

“I’ll show you how. Just be there.”

“We’ll have the band play something slow.” Snow was coming through the gaping wounds in the Valkyrie’s exterior. “I’d hate to step on your…”

**Author's Note:**

> sorry :'(
> 
> *****If you are currently contemplating suicide or just wishing you weren't alive, please seek help. It isn't easy to ask for help, but I promise you, YOU HAVE WORTH AND ARE WORTHY OF BEING ALIVE. You are NOT a burden to your friends, family, and society. If you are in the US, please take a look at suicidepreventionlifeline.org or call 1-800-273-8255. If you need someone to talk to who has had those thoughts and feelings before, I'll be your friend. I'm on tumblr at under_the_perseids and on twitter @stellar_show.


End file.
